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Wave of massive volcanoes created Earth’s first supercontinent

By Alice Klein

THE world’s continents arrived in a blaze of fury. A pressure blowout seems to have caused vast amounts of molten rock to spew from volcanoes and harden into solid land.

Until about 2.2 billion years ago, Earth was mostly under water. Small land masses existed, but not the vast continents of today. To understand how continents formed, Christopher Spencer at Curtin University in Australia and his colleagues studied the global geological record.

They found that almost no volcanic rocks were created between 2.3 and 2.2 billion years ago. “Plenty formed before and after, but hardly any formed …